The Energy of Within and Without

Two days ago, I showed you some binding energy. (You can refresh the discussion by clicking here. Yesterday, I showed its twin, caught energy, here.)
Today, I’d like to show you the energy that moves between them:

Ponderosa Pine

This is the energy of within and without. In its simple form, the one that concentrates on bodies separate from other bodies, it can be seen as a pair of spatial relationships: “in” and “out.” It places separate compounds and beings in space. It’s likely, this is how you’ve met it before. You can see it in the image of a young ponderosa pine below: the needles have definite boundaries, with chlorophyll in-side them and air out-side them. Between these two realms lies the skin of the needle: a transition zone that defines the relationship as consisting of in and out.

It is also relative. To the air, oxygen and carbon dioxide molecules are “in” and pine needles are “out.” In this conception (the one that fills many every day worlds), one can only inhabit one side of this relationship at the same time. One can’t, after all, be “in” and “out” at the same time, practical thinking has it…

… but one can. In the moment of observation, you are both within and without at the same time, just as the light in the image below is both within the pine needles and without them. If there’s a difference, it is because one has been declared, no more.

It’s not necessary to make such a declaration. If, for example, within-and-without is a form of energy, which takes form on both sides of a boundary, then the clarity of the light above and its embodiment and re-transmission within the needles are the same energy. In effect, it contains the boundary, or the leaf, within itself. More specifically, the needle’s surface takes the place of the human will that declared there to be an in and an out, and touches both at once.

To a tree, they aren’t in and out at all, but a part of the same essential process, of passing electrons across a membrane, or rooting in a soil atmosphere and branching in a celestial one.

That is what trees are, this balance. It is not a bridging energy, because it is less intentional than that and does not carry traffic.

Only confusion, however, results from ignoring it. Thank you, Ponderosa!

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Wonderful! Your photos, with all the movement and soft back-and-forth, carry the message perfectly. I bet you could describe both-within-and-without-at-once equally well, in terms of the sounds the needles make with the wind.

This is a Blog about People in Place

I am working at rebuilding human relationships to the earth, growing the global from the local and developing new environmental technologies out of close observation of the land. The land is the watershed and run of the Okanagan River in the North American West, and the Chilcotin and Columbia volcanic plateaus and basins that surround it. It is the goal of this blog to build the future now and to do it through attention to art, earth, science and beauty, so that there is, actually, a future for our children and a path for them to feel out their way to the earth should they ever find themselves in the dark. The project will lead to two book manuscripts in the summer of 2013, one on the salmon of the Okanagan River, the last major run on the Columbia system, and the other on the connection between the Manhattan Project and the political and industrial face of Eastern Washington and Southern British Columbia. They will do so within the broader context of land-based technologies, in forms that are simultaneously art and science. In this land without borders, there is no international line at the 49th parallel, cutting our country in two, and no imagined wall between settler and indigenous cultures. We are all walking together. We are all the land speaking.